Whittling-down of Public Protector candidates scheduled without committee approval

18 August 2016

The committee established to appoint the Public Protector has been scheduled to arbitrarily shortlist five candidates. This is highly irregular considering that this was at no point sanctioned by the committee itself. 

As such the DA will in today’s committee, scheduled for 13:00, take serious issue with the unilaterally decided meeting agenda. 

This development means that the Chairperson of the Committee, Dr Makhosi Khoza, is herself masquerading as a multiparty committee of Parliament. Failing which it can only be attributable to her allegiance to the ANC in the committee. This is profoundly ironic considering Dr Khoza herself asserted that “all committees of parliament are public. These processes must be transparent". 

This is likely so the ANC in Committee and Dr Khoza herself can bulldoze the committee into shortlisting their preferred candidates.

The DA, earlier this month, already took issue with the mismanagement of the Public Protector interview process which risked jeopardising the selection of a fit and proper candidate to continue the fight against corruption. This is after 14 interviews, some of which were over an hour long, were jammed into a single day, with overflow into the early hours of the following morning. The last candidate was called in for his hour long interview at 01:45 in the morning, after the panel had already spent almost 19 hours in the Chamber.

We will again appeal to the committee this afternoon to give effect to presiding over a process that is free from undue political considerations.

Issued by Glynnis Breytenbach, DA Shadow Minister of Justice, 18 August 2016